It had been a dark and constricted time: a time of dawn awakenings, dreams of suffocation. A time of mortal disquiet in the bathroom, blood on white ceramic. It had been a time of reaching to switch off the car radio during ads for life insurance, of my wife and me smiling less indulgently at our son’s persistent questions about death.
I felt no increased attraction toward cryonic suspension, or whole brain emulation, or radical life extension; I felt no greater urge toward becoming a machine. But I was by no means unflinching, either, in the face of my own animal mortality. I flinched constantly. I flinched as though my life depended on it. I felt a good deal less sanguine about this matter of my own mortality than I had on the Immortality Bus. Roen had been right, of course: I was guilty of deathism.
But on the gurney, at a palliative remove from the whole business of myself, all of that was an abstraction. I was a physical body, regarding itself on a screen, and I was also not a body at all, but a consciousness, or a sensation of consciousness. On the screen, a hooked metal instrument appeared, a small and intimately malevolent thing inside the body that I understood to be mine. A tiny movement, a tearing of flesh. A little blood, a withdrawal. This, I understood, was the biopsy.
The phrase “meat machine” was offered to me from nowhere, as if for inspection. I didn’t so much think about it as hold it for a moment, before letting it go.
I considered, with detachment, the detachment of my own considerations. I was thinking clearly for the first time, though what I was doing was scarcely thinking at all. I was, finally and literally, up my own arse. I had chosen the sedation because I feared the discomfort of penetration, but I was glad to be awake now, to be witnessing this merger of self and technology, this dissolution of boundaries. The paradoxical effect of this infiltration was that I felt inviolable, as though nothing could touch me. I felt that I finally understood what it might mean to be posthuman. In retrospect it was obviously the drugs, but at the time it felt like the technology.
A few minutes or a few hours later—it was impossible to tell, and irrelevant anyway—the gastroenterologist who’d performed the procedure appeared by my side. I was elsewhere now, back in the room where they’d inserted the cannula in the crook of my arm, though I had no memory of being taken there. It was strange, he said, a strange inflammation, but nothing sinister. Diverticular colitis, most likely. Not cancer, then? No, not cancer.
He said some more things, the general thrust of which was that I was not dying—not, at least, in any immediate sense—and then he went away.
I closed my eyes, and saw again the screen, the inner spaces, the soft and clean interior of the body. Painlessly, the opiate veil was being withdrawn. For a moment there, I had been outside of myself, outside of time. For a moment there, I had been at one with the technology.
I lay on my back on the gurney, and I looked at the cannula in my arm, one of the two channels through which science had recently entered my body. I slowly clenched and unclenched my hand, listening to the soft click of bones and ligaments in the wrist, its arcane technology of flexion and torsion. I thought of a question my son had put to my wife and me some days previously, while looking at his own hand.
“Why do we have skin?” he had asked, as though coming to sudden awareness of some long-standing absurdity.
“So that our skeletons are covered up,” my wife had replied.
I turned to my side and closed my eyes, and felt a gentle surge of relief at the realization that whatever was going on inside me was not going to kill me—that my skeleton would remain covered up for the foreseeable future, and that the machinery, the substrate, would continue to function, if perhaps a little less efficiently from this point on. I felt the distinction between myself and my body dissolve, like a dream of some impossible suspension. I was coming back to myself, whatever that meant. The problem of death—for this particular animal, in this particular instance—had been solved.
—
At time of writing, Zoltan’s campaign is still a going concern. Roen is still filming, still asking people whether they want to live forever, and if not, why not.
At time of writing, no minds have been uploaded, no patients awakened from cryonic suspension and returned to life. No artificial intelligence explosion has taken place, no Technological Singularity.
At time of writing, I regret to say, we are all of us still going to die.
Among the transhumanists, among their ideas and their fears and their desires, I sometimes found myself thinking that the future, if it came, would vindicate them by forgetting them. I sometimes found myself thinking that the situation of our species might change so totally in the decades and centuries to come that it would no longer be necessary to speak of a merger of humans and technology—that it might, in other words, no longer make sense to speak as though such a distinction existed. And that transhumanists, if they were to be remembered at all, would be thought of as a historical curiosity, as a group of people who spoke, out of their time, in their feverish way, of what was in fact to come.
I could tell you that I have seen this future, that I bear news of some great convergence or dissolution that awaits us. But it is only true, in the end, to say that I have seen the present, and the present is strange enough to be getting along with: filled with strange people, strange ideas, strange machines. And even this present is not knowable, or graspable—but it can at least be witnessed, glimpsed in brief flashes, before it’s gone. And it’s a futuristic place, the present, very much like the past. Or at least it was at the time I encountered it, which is already receding into oblivion, into memory.
What I came to feel, in the end, is that there is no such thing as the future, or that it exists as a hallucinatory likeness of the present, a comforting fairy tale or a terrifying horror story that we tell ourselves in order to justify or condemn the world we currently live in, the world that has been made around us—out of our desires, in spite of our better judgment.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a transhumanist. I am certain I would not want to live in their future. But I am not always certain I don’t live in their present.
What I mean to say is that I am part machine: encoded in the world, encrypted in its strange and irresistible signals. I look at my hands as they type, their hardware of bone and flesh, and I look at the images of these words as they appear on a screen, my screen: a feedback loop of input and output, an algorithmic pattern of signal and transmission. The data, the code, the communication.
I am remembering, now, a question that Marlo Webber asked me on my last night in Pittsburgh, down in the basement, with its mingled aromas of caramel vape smoke and sweat and burnt silicon.
He said: “What if we’re already living in the Singularity?” And as he said this, I remember, he picked up his smartphone and weighed it in his hand with rhetorical intent, flipping it, catching it. He was talking about the phone, I knew, but also all that it was connected to—the machines, the systems, the information. The unknowable vastness of the human world.
“What if it’s already started?” he said.
It was a good question, I told him. I’d have to think about it.
Acknowledgments
I could not have started this book, let alone completed it, without the support and encouragement of my wife, Amy. My gratitude for her love and wisdom exceeds any capacity I possess to express it in words. From the very beginning, the unseen hand behind this project has been that of my agent, Amelia “Molly” Atlas. I’m extremely fortunate to have her, and the good people of ICM, looking out for me. My deepest thanks are also due to Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown in London, and to Roxane Edouard. Yaniv Soha at Doubleday has been a wise and sustaining presence over the course of my writing this book. His enthusiasm and subtle editorial guidance have been invaluable. My thanks also to Margo Shickmanter for her work on the project. From the beginning, Max Porter at Granta has been an abundant source of insight and encouragement, and a generally terrific person to have in my cor
ner.
For their various hospitalities, kindnesses, and acts of professional and personal decency, I am also forever grateful to the following people: my parents, Michael and Deirdre O’Connell; Kathleen and Elizabeth Sheehan; Susan Smith; Colm and Alexa Bodkin; Lydia Kiesling; Dylan Collins; Ronan Perceval; Mike Freeman; Sam Bungey; Yousef Eldin; Daniel Caffrey; Paul Murray; Jonathan Dykes; Lisa Coen; Katie Raissian; Chris Russell; Michelle Dean; Sam Anderson; Dan Kois; Nicholson Baker; Brendan Barrington, and C. Max Magee.
This book could not have been written without the cooperation and assistance of the following people: Zoltan Istvan, Roen Horn, Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom, David Wood, Hank Pellissier, Maria Konovalenko, Laura Deming, Aubrey de Grey, Mike La Torra, Randal Koene, Todd Huffman, Miguel Nicolelis, Edward Boyden, Nate Soares, David Deutsch, Viktoriya Krakovna, Janos Kramar, Stuart Russell, Tim Cannon, Marlo Webber, Ryan O’Shea, Shawn Sarver, Danielle Greaves, Justin Worst, and Olivia Webb.
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About the Author
MARK O’CONNELL is a book columnist for Slate, a staff writer at The Millions, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” blog. His writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The Dublin Review. He lives in Dublin.
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